Proceedings Paper

Tapers suitable for a range of sensing applications have been produced using a heat and pull method. The standard heat
and pull method is much faster than chemical tapering and also allows multiple tapers to be formed on to a single fibre
for distributed sensing. A refinement of the heat and pull method is able to produce tapers extremely quickly, opening
up the possibility of cheap, mass produced sensing tapers in polymer optical fibres. A single and multiple liquid level
sensor is demonstrated.